Brave Nuclear World? – Second of Two Parts

This year marks the 20th
anniversary of the world's most notorious nuclear disaster. At 1:23 a.m. on
April 26, 1986, the Number Four reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in
northern Ukraine exploded and burned uncontrolled for 10 days, releasing over
100 times more radiation into the atmosphere than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki
bombs combined. At least 19 million hectares were heavily contaminated in
Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia. Prevailing winds and rain sent radioactive
fallout over much of Europe, and it was measured as far away as Alaska.
Approximately 7 million people lived in the contaminated zones in the former
Soviet Union at the time of the accident (over 5 million still do). More than
350,000 were evacuated, and 2,000 villages were demolished. Radioactive
foodstuffs from Belarus and Ukraine continue to show up in the markets of
Moscow, and farmers on 375 properties in Wales, Scotland, and England still
must grapple with restrictions due to radioactive contamination from Chernobyl.

The operating crew and the 600 men
in the plant's fire service who first responded to the disaster received the
highest doses of radiation, between 0.7 and 13 Sieverts (Sv). According to
chernobyl.info, a United Nations Internet-based information clearinghouse, this
is 700 to 13,000 times more radiation in just a few hours than the maximum dose
of 1 millisievert that the European Union says people living near a nuclear
power plant should be exposed to in one year. Thirty-one of those first on the
scene died within three months. A total of 800,000 "liquidators"-mainly
military conscripts from all over the former Soviet Union-were involved in the
clean-up until 1989, and government agencies in Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia
have reported that 25,000 have since died.

By any measure, Chernobyl was a
horrific catastrophe and has become the icon of nuclear power's satanic side.
Yet controversy has dogged the environmental and health impacts of Chernobyl
from the beginning. The Soviet leadership first hoped nobody would notice the
accident and then did their best to conceal and minimize the damage. As a
result, a full and accurate assessment of the consequences has proved impossible.
Historian and Chernobyl expert David Marples wrote that authorities in the
former Soviet Union classified all medical information related to the accident
while denying that illnesses among cleanup workers resulted from their
radiation exposure. Independent researchers have had difficulty locating
significant numbers of evacuees and those who worked on the cleanup, and they
have had to piece together their conclusions from interviews with medical
providers, citizens, officials in the contaminated areas, others involved, and
those cleanup workers they could find.

In September 2005, a report on the
health impacts of Chernobyl by the UN Chernobyl Forum (seven UN agencies plus
the World Bank and officials from Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia) said only 50 deaths
could be attributed to Chernobyl and ultimately 4,000 will die as a result of
the accident. The Chernobyl Forum report acknowledges that nine children died
from thyroid cancer and that 4,000 children contracted the disease, but puts
the survival rate at 99 percent. It denies any link with fertility problems and
says that the most significant health problems are due to poverty, lifestyle
(e.g., smoking, poor diet), and emotional problems, especially among evacuees.
Marples notes that the overall assessment of the Chernobyl Forum is "a
reassuring message."

The reality on the ground offers a
different picture. In Gomel, a city of 700,000 in Belarus less than 80
kilometers from the destroyed reactor and one of the most severely contaminated
areas, the documentary film Chernobyl Heart reports
the incidence of thyroid cancer is 10,000 times higher than before the accident
and by 1990 had increased 30-fold throughout Belarus, which received most of
the radioactive fallout. Chernobyl.info states that congenital birth defects in
Gomel have jumped 250 percent since the accident, and infant mortality is 300
percent higher than in the rest of Europe. A doctor interviewed in Chernobyl Heart says just 15 to 20 percent of the
babies born at the Gomel Maternity Hospital are healthy. Chernobyl Children's
Project International executive director Adi Roche says it's impossible to
prove that Chernobyl caused the problems: "All we can say is the defects are
increasing, the illnesses are increasing, the genetic damage is increasing."
Referring to a facility for abandoned children, she adds, "places like this
didn't exist before Chernobyl, so it speaks for itself." Marples, who has made
numerous trips to the Chernobyl region over the past 20 years, reports the
health crisis in Belarus today is so serious that there are open discussions of
a "demographic doomsday."

The long-lived nature of the
radionuclides and the fact that they are migrating through the contaminated
regions' ecosystems into the groundwater and food chain further complicate the
task of predicting the full impact of the disaster. But as the global campaign
to build new reactors gains momentum, it bears asking whether a Chernobyl could
happen elsewhere.

It
Can't Happen Here

Nobody wants any more
Chernobyls. The question is, can that outcome be ensured without phasing out
nuclear power altogether? The Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), the trade
association and lobbying arm of the American nuclear power industry, says a
Chernobyl-type accident is highly unlikely in the United States because of "key
differences in U.S. reactor design, regulation, and emergency preparedness."
Safety is assured, NEI says, by the strategy of "defense in depth," which
relies on a combination of multiple, redundant, independently operating safety
systems; physical barriers such as the steel reactor vessel and the typically
three- to four-foot steel-reinforced concrete containment dome that would stop
radiation from escaping; ongoing preventive and corrective maintenance; ongoing
training of technical staff; and extensive government oversight. A key argument
for nuclear power these days is the claim that nuclear reactors are safe and
reliable.

The U.S. nuclear fleet has
substantially increased its "capacity factor" (for a given period, the output
of a generating unit as a percentage of total possible output if run at full
power) since 1980. However, David Lochbaum, director of the Nuclear Safety
Project at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), points out that since the
Three Mile Island accident in central Pennsylvania in 1979, 45 reactors (out of
104 operating U.S. units) have been shut down longer than one year to restore
safety margins. A nuclear engineer by training, Lochbaum left the industry
after 17 years when he and a co-worker were unable to get their employer or the
Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to address safety issues at the Susquehanna
plant in northeastern Pennsylvania. (The problem at that plant and others
across the country was corrected after they testified before Congress.) For the
last 10 years Lochbaum has been at UCS monitoring the safety of the nation's
nuclear power plants and raising concerns with the NRC. He does not share the
industry's confidence in the safety of the current fleet.

Nuclear power plants are incredibly
complex systems that perform a relatively simple task: heating water to create
steam that spins a turbine and generates electricity. Lochbaum explains that
nuclear plant safety problems tend to follow a bathtub curve: the greatest
number come at the beginning of a reactor's life, then after a few years when
the plant is "broken in" and staff are familiar with its specific needs,
problems drop and level off until the plant begins to age.

Most of the current U.S. fleet is
either in or entering its twilight years, and since the late 1990s the NRC has
allowed reactors to increase the amount of electricity they generate by up to
20 percent, which exceeds what the plants were designed to handle. Such "power
uprates" push greater volumes of cooling water through the plant, causing more
wear and tear on pipes and other equipment. The agency has also granted 20-year
license extensions to 39 reactors, and most of the rest are expected to apply
before their initial 40-year licenses expire. At the same time, Lochbaum says,
the NRC is cutting back on the amount and frequency of safety tests and
inspections. Tests that were carried out quarterly are now performed annually,
and once-annual tests are now done when reactors are shut down for refueling,
about every two years.

The NRC maintains that it is
providing adequate oversight to keep the public safe and prevent serious
reactor accidents. Gary Holahan, an official in the NRC's Office of Nuclear
Reactor Regulation, explains that extended power uprates, which raise the power
output of a reactor between 7 and 20 percent, require modifications to the
plant that involve upgrading or replacing equipment like high pressure
turbines, pumps, motors, main generators, and transformers. Before a power
uprate is granted, he says, the NRC must make a finding that it complies with
federal regulations and that there's "a reasonable assurance" that the health
and safety of the public will not be endangered.

Lochbaum says the NRC's handling of
the large power uprates illustrates the problems with its oversight. In an
issue brief entitled "Snap, Crackle, & Pop: The BWR Power Uprate
Experiment," he says the Quad Cities Unit 2 reactor in Illinois "literally
began shaking itself apart at the higher power level" after operating for nearly
30 years at its originally licensed power level. After the uprate was approved,
the steam dryer developed a 2.7 meter crack, and the component was replaced in
May 2005. In early April of this year, he says Quad Cities staff found a 1.5
meter crack in the new steam dryer, and they still don't know exactly what is
causing the problem. After the problem was first reported, manufacturer General
Electric (GE) surveyed 15 of its other boiling water reactors around the world
that had been granted 20-percent power uprates and reported problems-all
vibration related-in 13.

Despite objections from the Vermont
Public Service Board and one of its own commissioners, the NRC recently granted
a 20-percent power uprate to the 33-year-old Vermont Yankee reactor. Stuart
Richards, deputy director of the NRC's Division of Inspection, says the
commission approved the power uprate after a first-time pilot engineering
inspection that included an 11,000-manhour technical review failed to find any
significant safety issues. "It's not the age of the plant but the physical
condition of the components and how well the facility maintains the plant" that
is important, he says. In addition, the power is being increased in
NRC-monitored stages. But none of this reassures Lochbaum, who points out that
this single-unit plant was badly maintained for much of its operating life,
making it an especially poor candidate for a practice known to stress reactors.
Applications for extended power uprates at six reactors are pending, and the
NRC expects nine more through 2011.

The NRC says it is doing a smarter
job of regulating the industry today by pinpointing areas likely to need more
attention. "The agency and the industry as a whole over the last 10 to 15 years
have developed better and better tools to determine what is risk-significant
and what is less risk-significant," Richards explains. "So in some cases where
in the past we have required more maintenance or surveillance, now those
requirements are less stringent, because the components have been demonstrated
to be less significant." In other cases, he says, performing too much
maintenance can be detrimental, because the components are needed to do their
job, and they can be tested "to the point where it causes them to have
degradation."

Lochbaum says the flaw in that
logic is well illustrated by a near miss at the Davis-Besse plant in Ohio. In
2002 it was discovered that boric acid escaping from the reactor for several
years had eaten a 15-centimeter hole in the reactor vessel's steel lid, leaving
a thin layer of stainless steel bulging outward from the pressure. Boric acid
had been observed on the vessel head in 1996, 1998, and again in 2000, and NRC
staff drafted an order in November 2001 to shut Davis-Besse down for a safety
inspection. NRC nevertheless allowed the reactor to continue operating until
February 2002, when plant workers almost accidentally found the hole. If the
reactor head had burst, the reactor would likely have melted down.

Lochbaum and former NRC
commissioner Peter Bradford say the Davis-Besse incident and numerous others
indicate that the agency seems to be more interested in the short-term economic
interest of the nuclear industry than in carrying out its mission to protect
public health and safety. Bradford points to an internal NRC survey in 2002
revealing that nearly half of all NRC employees thought they would be
retaliated against if they raised safety concerns, and that of those who did
report problems, one-third said they suffered harassment as a result. Several
critics say the safety culture of the commission changed after Senator Pete
Domenici-perhaps the nuclear industry's biggest champion in Congress-told the
NRC chairman in 1998 that he would cut the agency's budget by a third if it
didn't reverse its "adversarial attitude" toward the industry.

Given the regulatory environment
and an aging fleet of reactors, Lochbaum fears that another serious accident is
inevitable. He uses the analogy of a slot machine, but instead of oranges,
bananas, and cherries, the winning combination is an initiating event, like a
broken pipe or a fire; equipment failure; and human error. "As the plants get
older, we're starting to see the wheels come up more often, which suggests it's
only a matter of time before all three come up at once," he says.

Nuclear proponents claim the new
advanced designs are much safer. Unlike current plants with their multiple
back-up systems, the new "passive safety" designs, such as Westinghouse's
AP1000 pressurized water reactor (PWR) and GE's ABWR (Advanced Boiling Water
Reactor) and ESBWR (Economic Simplified Boiling Water Reactor), rely on gravity
rather than an army of pumps to push the water up into the reactor vessel and
through the cooling system. Because the systems are smaller, there are fewer
components to break.

Physicist Ed Lyman, a colleague of
Lochbaum's at UCS who has been studying the new designs, is skeptical of the
safety claims of the passive designs. He explains that slashing costs,
particularly of piping and the enormously expensive steel-reinforced rebar
concrete, motivated the new LWR designs, not safety. It was thought that if the
power output of the reactors was lower, a gravity-driven system could dump
water into the reactor core without the need for forced circulation and its
miles of pipes and accompanying equipment.

Numerous tests of the
gravity-driven water system for the AP600, the smaller predecessor to the
AP1000, showed the system worked, and NRC certified the design. However, the
current trend in reactors is for larger units with higher output. The cost of
the AP600 wasn't low enough to offset the loss in generation capacity, so none
sold. The AP600 then morphed into the AP1000. GE's new "passive safety" designs
followed a similar trajectory beginning with a 600-megawatt design, the SBWR
(Simplified Boiling Water Reactor). The company's next design, the ABWR, was
1,350 megawatts, and its ESBWR is 1,560.

The NRC recently certified the
AP1000. Lyman is concerned the agency is relying on computer modeling rather
than experimental data to demonstrate that gravity-driven cooling will work in
these much larger designs. He's also troubled that the containment structures
of the new PWRs are less robust than those in the current fleet. NRC's Gary
Holahan acknowledges that the agency relied on the tests from the AP600 and
computer modeling for the AP1000, but says that after extensive review by the
commission's technical staff and the Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards,
it determined that additional testing was not necessary. Nor does the NRC have
any concerns about the thickness of the AP1000's containment dome compared to
those of existing PWRs.

Increasing numbers of nuclear
proponents and news reports are describing new reactor designs, such as the
pebble bed modular reactor, as "accident-proof" or "fail-safe"-so safe, in
fact, that the pebble bed doesn't need (or have) a containment structure. Lyman
disagrees. The pebble bed is moderated by helium instead of water and uses
uranium fuel pellets encased in silicon carbide, ceramic material, and
graphite. He says experiments conducted at the AVR demonstration reactor in
Germany, the first one ever built, have shown that the models underestimated
how hot the pellets could get. The pellets degrade quickly upon reaching the
critical temperature, which could lead to a large release of radiation. "So,
they just don't have the predictive capacity or the understanding of how these
reactors or the fuel technology work to say it's meltdown-proof," he says.

Going
to Waste

In the light-water reactors
that make up the majority of the world's reactor fleet, uranium fuel is loaded
into the reactor, then bombarded by neutrons to trigger the nuclear fission
chain reaction. After awhile all of the fissionable material in the uranium
fuel is used up, or "spent." But the neutron bombardment makes the fuel
two-and-a-half million times more radioactive, according to Marvin Resnikoff, a
nuclear physicist with Radioactive Waste Management Associates in New York. By
2035, American nuclear power plants will have created an estimated 105,000
metric tons of spent fuel that is so deadly it must be completely isolated from
the environment for tens or even hundreds of thousands of years. A Nevada state
agency report put the toxicity in perspective: even after 10 years out of the
reactor, an unshielded spent fuel assembly would emit enough radiation to kill
somebody standing a meter away from it in less than three minutes.

No country has yet successfully
dealt with its high-level nuclear waste from the first generation of reactors,
let alone made plans for the added waste from a vast expansion of nuclear
power. Most agree that deep geologic burial is the safest and cheapest disposal
method, and countries are in various stages of picking and developing their
sites. Steve Frishman of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects thinks the
Finns are furthest along, having chosen a permanent repository at a crystalline
bedrock site at Olkiluoto that already hosts two operating reactors and one
under construction. The site has been tested extensively to ensure it will
effectively isolate the waste 420-520 meters down. The repository is expected
to open in 2020.

The Swedes also plan to construct
their repository in a deep underground granite site, though they have not yet
picked the final location. They will encapsulate the spent nuclear fuel in
copper canisters surrounded by bentonite clay, which swells up and makes its
own watertight seal when exposed to water. Frishman says that's an extra
precaution, because while they will probably find some water 500 meters
underground where they plan to put the canisters, the water there is not
oxygenated and would probably not corrode the canisters even if it did come in
contact with them. The Swedish approach is enormously expensive, but they say results,
not costs, are guiding their decisions.

These approaches seem reasonably
cautious and thus offer some hope that the waste problem-which must be solved
no matter what happens to nuclear power-might not be intractable. The U.S.
approach, however, is less reassuring. Politics, rather than science-determined
suitability, led the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to Yucca Mountain, a ridge
of volcanic tuff on the edge of the U.S. Nuclear Test Site in the Nevada desert
about 145 kilometers northwest of Las Vegas. Nevada was designated by default
in an amendment (later tagged as the "Screw Nevada Bill") to the 1982 Nuclear
Waste Policy Act that prohibited DOE from considering any sites in granite.

Aside from being located in the
third most seismically active region in the country, Yucca Mountain is so
porous that after just 50 years isotopes from atmospheric atom bomb tests have
already seeped down into the underlying aquifer. But since the mountain was
designated as the nation's only repository site, Frishman says DOE has been
trying to engineer its way around the problems, and when it can't do that,
change the rules. The latest attempt is legislation proposed by the Bush
administration that among other things would raise the repository's current
legal limit of 70,000 metric tons of high-level waste, remove the nuclear waste
fund (money collected over the years from ratepayers by nuclear utilities to
build a repository) from federal budgetary oversight, and exempt metals in the
underground metal containers from regulation, leaving chromium, molybdenum, and
zinc free to contaminate the area's groundwater.

On the basis of the geological
instability of the site, Nevada is aggressively fighting the repository. In
2004 a federal court ruled that an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) health
standard that applied for the first 10,000 years was inadequate because the
National Academy of Sciences determined that peak doses would likely occur at
least 200,000 years after the waste was placed in the site. NRC therefore could
not license the site. EPA has since proposed another health standard, which
appears to ignore the court ruling by allowing radiation exposure to residents
of the nearby Amargossa Valley to jump from a mean of 15 millirems per year for
the first 10,000 years to a median value of 350 millirems per year
subsequently.

Ultimately, Frishman does not
believe Yucca Mountain can meet any real health-based standard. Furthermore, he
points out, whatever standard is finally adopted is irrelevant once a licensing
decision is made and the waste is placed in the repository: "The site is the
standard."

Reprocessing

The nuclear power industry
did not expect Nevada's legal challenges to be so successful, and U.S. nuclear
proponents have begun to think beyond Yucca Mountain. They maintain that the
development of fast breeder reactors, which create nuclear fuel by producing
more fissile material than they consume, along with reprocessing the spent fuel
(separating out the still-usable plutonium and uranium) will reduce the volume
of waste and negate the need for geologic disposal.

Since it was originally assumed
that reprocessing would be part of the nuclear fuel cycle, commercial reactors
were not designed to house all of the waste they would create during their
operational lives. Three commercial reprocessing facilities were built in the
United States, though only one, at West Valley in western New York state, ever
operated. After six years of troubled operation marked by accidents,
mishandling of high-level wastes, and contamination of nearby waterways, it was
shut down in 1972. In 1977 the Carter administration banned reprocessing due to
concerns about nuclear weapons proliferation after India stunned the world by
testing its first atomic bomb, which was made with plutonium from its
reprocessing facility. According to UCS, approximately 240 metric tons of
separated plutonium-enough for 40,000 nuclear weapons-was in storage worldwide
as of the end of 2003. Reprocessing the U.S. spent fuel inventory would add
more than 500 metric tons.

France, Britain, Russia, India, and
Japan currently reprocess spent fuel, and the Bush administration is pushing to
revive reprocessing in the United States. It has allocated $130 million to
begin developing an "integrated spent fuel cycle," and recently announced
another $250 million, primarily to develop UREX+, a technology said to address
proliferation concerns by leaving the separated plutonium too radioactive for
potential thieves to handle. In addition, the U.S. Congress has directed the
administration to prepare a plan by 2007 to pick a technology to reprocess all
of the spent fuel from commercial nuclear reactors and start building an
engineering-scale demonstration plant.

UCS's Ed Lyman says it is "a myth"
that reprocessing spent nuclear fuel reduces the volume of nuclear waste: "All
reprocessing does is take spent fuel that's compact, and it spreads-smears-it
out into dozens of different places." Current reprocessing technology uses
nitric acid to dissolve the fuel assemblies and separate out plutonium and
uranium. But it also leaves behind numerous extremely radioactive fission
products as well as high-level liquid waste that is typically solidified in
glass. In the process, a lot of radioactive gas is discharged into the
environment, and there is additional liquid waste that's too expensive to
isolate, he says: "So, that's just dumped into the ocean-that's the practice in
France and the U.K."

Matthew Bunn, acting director of
Harvard University's Project on Managing the Atom, has laid out a number of
additional arguments against reprocessing. First, reprocessing spent fuel
doesn't negate the need for or reduce the space required in a permanent
repository, because a repository's size is determined by the heat output of the
waste, not its volume. Second, reprocessing would substantially increase the
cost of managing nuclear waste and wouldn't make sense economically unless
uranium topped US$360 per kilogram, a price he says is not likely for several
decades, if ever. Third, in this new era of heightened violence and terrorism,
the proliferation risks-which would not be addressed by the new reprocessing
technologies-take on even greater urgency. Fourth, reprocessing is also a
dangerous technology with a track record of terrible accidents, including the
world's worst pre-Chernobyl nuclear accident (a 1957 explosion at a
reprocessing plant near Khystym in Russia) and other incidents in Russia and
Japan as recently as the 1990s. Fifth, the new "advanced" reprocessing
technologies, UREX+ and pyroprocessing, are complex, expensive, in their
infancy, and unlikely to yield substantial improvements over existing
reprocessing methods. Finally, Bunn argues, the Bush administration's rush to
embrace reprocessing spent nuclear fuel is premature and unnecessary, since the
spent fuel can remain in dry casks at nuclear power plants for decades while
better solutions are sought.

Solution
in Search of Problem

In the end, the case for
nuclear power hinges on an evaluation of its costs and benefits compared with
those of the alternatives. Many observers expect a growing ecological, social,
and economic crisis unless we figure out how to retard and ultimately reverse
climate change by weaning ourselves off increasingly scarce, expensive, and
conflict-ridden fossil fuels. Nuclear power, until recently a pariah due to its
enormous cost and demonstrated potential for serious accidents, is now touted
as an indispensable solution. Nuclear power's dark side-its environmental
legacy, high cost, and danger of accidents and the spread of atomic weapons-is
currently downplayed. No energy system is without costs, but alternatives that
avoid these particularly grave drawbacks do exist.

Space limitations preclude a
comprehensive review of the alternatives, but their prospects have never been
brighter. For instance, a 2005 report by the New Economics Foundation (NEF)
says a broad mix of renewable energy sources that includes micro, small-,
medium- and large-scale technologies applied flexibly could "more than meet all
our needs." Besides solar and wind power, the mix includes tidal, wave,
small-scale hydro, geothermal, biomass, and landfill gas. Rather than relying
exclusively on large baseload suppliers of electricity like nuclear plants, or
single sources of renewable energy that are not always available, the
foundation says the key is setting up an extensive, diverse, and decentralized
network of power sources, which would also be much less susceptible to
widespread power outages. The total capital cost of setting up such a system
has not been calculated and would vary greatly depending on whether it was
implemented all at once or incrementally, building on transition technologies.
According to the NEF report, a nuclear-generated kilowatthour of
electricity-factoring in construction and operating costs but not waste
management, insurance against accidents, or preventing nuclear weapons
proliferation-costs up to 15.6 U.S. cents, significantly higher than other
sources.

Governments and markets are
beginning to recognize the potential of renewable energy and its use is growing
rapidly. According to Worldwatch Institute's Renewables
2005, global investment in renewable energy in 2004 was about US$30 billion.
The report points out that renewable sources generated 20 percent of the amount
of electricity produced by the world's 443 operating nuclear reactors in 2004.
Renewables now account for 20-25 percent of global power sector investment, and
the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development predicts that over
the next 30 years one-third of the investment in new power sources in OECD
countries will be for renewable energy.

Alternative energy guru Amory
Lovins says the investment in alternatives is currently "an order of magnitude"
greater than that now being spent on building new nuclear plants. Lovins has
been preaching lower-cost alternatives, including energy conservation, for more
than three decades, and the realization of his vision of sustainable, renewable
energy is perhaps closer than ever. He argues that the current moves to
re-embrace nuclear power are a huge step backwards, and that contrary to claims
that we need to consider all options to deal with global warming, nuclear power
would actually hinder the effort because of the high cost and the long time it
would take to get enough carbon-displacing nuclear plants up and running. "In
practice, keeping nuclear power alive means diverting private and public
investment from the cheaper market winners-cogeneration, renewables, and
efficiency-to the costly market loser. Its higher cost than competitors, per
unit of net CO2 displaced, means that every dollar invested in
nuclear expansion will worsen climate
change," he writes in his 2005 paper "Nuclear Power: Economics and
Climate-Protection Potential."

As noted in Part One of this series, doubling
the world's current nuclear energy output would reduce global carbon emissions
by just one-seventh of the amount required to avoid the worst impacts of global
warming. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology point out
that achieving even this inadequate result would require siting a permanent
repository the size of Yucca Mountain every three to four years to deal with
the additional waste-an enormous and expensive challenge. Given nuclear power's
drawbacks, and the growth and promise of clean, lower cost, less dangerous
alternatives, the case for nuclear power wobbles badly. Stripped of the pretext
that nuclear power is the answer to climate change, the case essentially
collapses.

Karen Charman is an independent journalist specializing in environmental issues, and the managing editor of the journal Capitalism Nature Socialism.